WHiSe III is a symposium aimed at strengthening
communication between scholars in the Digital Humanities and Semantic
Web communities and discussing unthought-of opportunities arising from
the research problems of the former. Its best-of-both-worlds format will
accommodate the practices of scholarly dialogue in both fields by
inviting visions, real systems and debate.

Call for papers

The emergence of tractable and affordable methods for the collection, enhancement and
analysis of data generated en masse has helped shape several research fields, such as
social sciences, into structured research fields. Digital Humanities are enjoying such a
transformation to the point that their very boundaries and methodological foundations are
being called into question. The quality and relevance of findings obtained from the
thorough, human-driven analysis of a few sources, compared to unsupervised large-scale
analytics on masses of data, is a fervent ongoing debate; and yet, the latter cannot
prescind from a conscious effort in shaping the world to which the analyses need to
relate. This has largely taken the form of knowledge modelling efforts, from which many
ontologies, controlled vocabularies and conceptual models like CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana
Data Model and FRBRoo have arisen. However, other fields traditionally less reliant on
machine-readable data have seen the emergence of ‘ecological’ communities with an approach
to the Web of Data. Recent examples include the 2014 ISAW papers for the ancient world,
Transforming Musicology for music and musicology
and Linked Pasts for history and archaeology.

As these emerging research networks deal with the reality of the Semantic Web and the
ever-growing Linked Data Cloud, the WHiSe workshop series was conceived from a reflection
on the extent to which the Semantic Web community is serving the needs of historians,
philologists, cultural critics, musicologists and other humanists that generally: (1)
cannot rely on structured data generated en masse through social networks or online media
platforms; (2) deal with vague, fragmentary, uncertain, contradictory and yet still
valuable evidence that poses a challenge even to Artificial Intelligence research per se;
(3) have good reason to value the systematic investigation of a few sources over the
(semi-)automated analytical findings on masses of content. WHiSe addresses this need by
promoting dialogue between humanists who employ or are contemplating Semantic Web
technologies, and Semantic Web scholars providing accounts of applied research in the
Humanities. It will also be a forum for raising opportunities to explore novel research
problems that can be relevant to both communities.

WHiSe III welcomes original research contributions crossing Humanities and the Semantic
Web. Scholars who have conducted research or developed impactful applications are invited
to submit full papers (12 pages, Springer LNCS typeset) with appropriately evaluated
contributions. WHiSe III also welcomes short vision or position papers (6 pages, Springer
LNCS typeset) on novel challenges or approaches to existing problems.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Knowledge base generation from classical texts

Linking data within and across gazetteers

Semantic enrichment of data from historical records and biographies

Ecosystems and process descriptions for linking data in the humanities

Linked Digital Libraries and semantic archives

Ontology adoption in specific domains in the humanities

Knowledge graph construction and exploitation within and across domains

Computational methods for the prosopography of historical figures

Capturing, modelling and reasoning on musical data

The role of ontologies and controlled vocabularies in data preservation

Criticism of Semantic Web standards from the point of view of humanities scholarship

Ethical issues in using Semantic Web and Linked Data and their impact on the openness of
traditional research data

Notions on integrating digital humanities and data science

Knowledge bottlenecks and practical difficulties in using Semantic Web technologies by
humanities scholars

Utopian / dystopian visions of the Semantic Web of the future

Submissions in all the categories mentioned above (both full and short papers) will be
peer-reviewed by acknowledged researchers familiar with both scientific communities.
Accepted papers will be published as online proceedings courtesy of CEUR-WS.org.

Submission Instructions

Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content,
style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop.

Page limits are inclusive of references and appendices, if any. Papers are to be submitted
through the EasyChair Conference Management System. Please note that paper submissions to WHiSe III are not anonymous.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop, in order to
present the paper there, and to the conference. For further instructions please refer to
the LDK 2019 page.

Prior Publication and Multiple Submissions

Every submitted paper must represent original and unpublished work: it must not be under
review or accepted elsewhere and there must be a significantly clear element of novelty
distinguishing a submitted paper from any other prior publication or current submission.
See also the guidelines of the LDK 2019 call for papers.